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I once came in second to Ted for an award.

My reaction: "Cool! I won!"
posted to MetaFilter by jscalzi at 4:43 PM on February 21, 2022

I actually remember the A Very Young Model book -- and picking it up when I was older gave me an eerie shock as the child model they focus on mentions her friend Brooke who's also a model. The book's subject also mentions that she's just been contacted to be in a movie -- actually, she and her friend Brooke are both up for the part -- her mother's checking the script out, but she knows it's about a girl who gets shipwrecked at a lagoon and they fall in love and...... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by EmpressCallipygos at 1:47 PM on November 17, 2011

God, how awesome is Jill Krementz.
posted to MetaFilter by penduluum at 2:10 PM on November 17, 2011

When my BFF was pregnant I had to miss her surprise baby shower because I was stage managing a play at the exact moment it was happening. (I called during intermission to say hi, talked briefly and then had to go; it killed me I couldn't be there. Turns out that my friend really hated that they were throwing her the party and she was much more grateful I wasn't there, so she could vent about it when I called later that night.)

But after the show,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by EmpressCallipygos at 1:17 PM on February 9, 2022

After the execution of court-authorized search warrants of online accounts controlled by Lichtenstein and Morgan, special agents obtained access to files within an online account controlled by Lichtenstein.

Music happens to be the food of love
Sounds to really make you rub and scrub
I say...
Pass the bitcoin back from Lichtenstein
Pass the bitcoin back from Lichtenstein
posted to MetaFilter by mandolin conspiracy at 5:23 PM on February 8, 2022

I think we will get more and more moody pieces about the '90s, which I have already begun seeing, now that the people who were young and hopeful then are middle-aged and miserable. When I began to see '90s pop culture nostalgia, driven by the people who were children then, I was bewildered: it was boring, I said. Sure, there was some good TV and the flannels were warm, but --

Well, that wasn't the point. It was boring because it was safe. I was a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Countess Elena at 3:27 PM on February 7, 2022

When I was 16, I invited several of my friends to a party at my house to celebrate the 8th of the 8th month, 1988.
It was my mother's idea
We toasted marshmallows in the fireplace.
I miss my mother.
posted to MetaFilter by Zumbador at 9:09 PM on February 2, 2022

Go Commies!
posted to MetaFilter by Mister Fabulous at 11:00 AM on February 2, 2022

The fact that the post about a solo developer selling a daily word game for Xmillion dollars to a newspaper has nearly twice the comments of a post about a multinational electronixs corporation buying a legendary FPS game development studio for Xbillion dollars speaks to why Metafilter is my kind of place.
posted to MetaFilter by subocoyne at 4:00 PM on January 31, 2022

> Dordle is better anyway

I know! And it should be a bargain in the low 14 figures.

For real though, he held out for a while with the no ads thing, and I salute him for that. But once people start backing up the trucks full of cash? I mean you can't let it go to waste, can you.
posted to MetaFilter by kleinsteradikaleminderheit at 2:59 PM on January 31, 2022

(there were so few women on TV then who were allowed to be pretty and smart - to have someone who was glamorous and smart AND funny - and especially at the expense of people who continually underestimated her - adolescent me was taking notes)

And that the two female characters, while being different "types," were positioned from the very beginning to be mutually supportive friends instead of rivals!
posted to MetaFilter by The Underpants Monster at 8:53 AM on January 31, 2022

In 1982 I was at loose ends after a divorce. One night after watching WKRP with my parents (and laughing an awful lot), my Dad turned to me and said, "You have a deep voice. You know a lot about music. You could be a radio DJ." The next day I got a job doing that and stayed with it 24 years. I left radio a long time ago, but now my inspiration is gone, and it seems like the end of an era personally.

.
posted to MetaFilter by Miss Cellania at 7:21 AM on January 31, 2022

My favorite Johnny Fever line is when they're on the elevator, and he pops the control panel box open.

"Yeah, we had 'em like this in 'Nam."

I'm old enough now, that when I use that line when doing anything mechanical, the kids I work with look at me with a new kind of appreciation, regardless of the fact that I was like 2 years old when 'Nam was a thing.
posted to MetaFilter by valkane at 7:08 AM on January 31, 2022

I'm late to this thread because I had professional obligations (although I managed to sneak in a tiny mention of his passing while covering Cincinnati's improbable AFC Championship Game win for The Guardian, which felt like kismet). First of all, Howard Hesseman was way more than Dr. Johnny Fever. He was one of those actors that every single time you saw him, you knew he was going to be great. I think my favorite non-"WKRP" role was probably on "Soap" but there are so many... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by HunterFelt at 11:45 PM on January 30, 2022

The fact that the US has lasted this long has been a minor miracle.

In my more cheerful, hopeful moods—"hope amidst perdition" rather than blithe optimism—I remember that our country started, not as the egalitarian utopia our high school history books pretend it was, but as something a couple of degrees less horseshit than the thing that, in retrospect, was so horseshit that we can't believe people ever lived like that before.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 8:31 AM on January 31, 2022

WKRP was hugely formative for me as a kid. I desperately wanted to grow up to be Dr. Johnny Fever when I was in single digits. Never quite grew out of that, got a chance to work as a DJ while in college. Yes, I did say "booger" at the first opportunity.

Turns out I missed the detail about Johnny always being broke. I worked in a tiny market and moved on to other things, but if I'm being honest I loved that job more... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jzb at 6:42 PM on January 30, 2022

It was the Phone Cops.

My sister and I still always invoke the Phone Cops whenever conspiracy theories come up in conversation.
posted to MetaFilter by The Underpants Monster at 5:11 PM on January 30, 2022

It was the Phone Cops.
posted to MetaFilter by Capt. Renault at 4:56 PM on January 30, 2022

"Wake up, sucker! This is the phone company we're talking about!"
posted to MetaFilter by mandolin conspiracy at 2:56 PM on January 30, 2022

Oh man, he was so great. WKRP was such a formative influence on me. And I still laugh to myself every time I think of the bit mentioned above about the dogs barking. The episode where Johnny Fever and Venus Flytrap get stuck at the transmission tower is comedy gold, and he was brilliant.
posted to MetaFilter by kitten kaboodle at 2:45 PM on January 30, 2022

.

"This is Johnny Fever at WKRP, bringing you more music and Les Nessman."

Due to my age I got familiar with him first in Head of the Class. Which I still have fond memories of and I hope holds up. But WKRP is a tier higher on great shows.
posted to MetaFilter by mark k at 2:34 PM on January 30, 2022

Was I the only one who really liked Head of the Class??

.
posted to MetaFilter by Melismata at 12:56 PM on January 30, 2022

I guess it's important for museums to axalot of questions.
posted to MetaFilter by zamboni at 10:26 AM on January 28, 2022

Because Barry Bonds’ career, good and evil, is a necessary part of baseball history. One that should be documented and put on display.

This is a great argument for including Bonds in a Museum of Baseball History, but not a Hall of Fame.

Nobody learned a goddamn thing from any of this, which is antithetical to the mission of the Hall of Fame. This is a museum of baseball history.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by mstokes650 at 3:07 PM on January 26, 2022

I'm not sure who it was I read that called The Martian "competence porn" but ever since I read it, I thought YES - that's what I'm looking for, mostly in speculative fiction but also in non-sci-fi as well. It doesn't have to be 100% realistically possible, and I don't want Mary Janes, but smart people who care about science and are good at their jobs and take what they do seriously, working together - I just want to see more of that. I get that from a lot of Ted Chiang's work (I loved... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mchelly at 7:05 AM on January 26, 2022

You might also like the (all text) Case Against Crypto by Stephen Diehl. Taken together, Diehl and Olson's work has heavily informed my thinking on the topic.

Cryptocurrencies aren’t currencies and have no mechanism to ever become currencies. They are effectively unregulated securities where the only purpose of the products is price appreciation untethered to any economic activity. The only use case is gambling on the random price oscillations, attempting to... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by mhoye at 5:53 AM on January 25, 2022

I can't believe no one has yet linked to Dan's awesome "In search of a flat earth". The one with the twist at the 37 minute mark.
posted to MetaFilter by St. Oops at 12:36 AM on January 25, 2022

It's a really good video but it also made me feel like shit afterwards. Like, I thought I knew what was bad about crypto and NFTs and it turns out no I don't did you know about all this other bullshit that's orders of magnitudes worse. And it's not just environmental concerns or people getting scammed or the fact that nothing of value is being traded, it's somehow worse than all of those things.

The material on what it's like to be in an NFT... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by chrominance at 10:16 PM on January 24, 2022

So in my head L2 was somewhere between the Earth and the Sun...because I know nothing about orbital mechanics and just assumed it was somewhere between the two bodies with the Earth tugging on one side and the Sun on the other. If I understand anything (a dubious proposition at best) I was thinking of L1. So the animation linked on that page really helped. Still can't say I understand the forces but at least I can kind of understand where it is.....and I guess L2 being further from the Sun... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by inflatablekiwi at 9:18 AM on January 25, 2022

I had the end of a semi-recent relationship presaged by my then-girlfriend being appalled, three minutes into "I'd Do Anything For Love," that there was a non-radio edit version of the song that went another eleven minutes longer. Which, to me, is exactly as long as I need to savor that song—it's like a pop song so good that you play it over and over and over once it's finished, only it does you the courtesy of playing itself over four times for you.

Going All... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 5:52 AM on January 21, 2022

I remember being around the MIT area in Cambridge, MA, and you could have mall cops, the campus cops, city cops and state troopers, and then the FBI, all potentially with different levels of jurisdiction.

It's wild to me how many different agencies have their own police forces. Mall cops are generally "private security" and don't have any deputized powers, but you also missed the sheriff's office (county-level) and transit police that... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by backseatpilot at 10:01 AM on January 20, 2022

My mind is perpetually boggled that these are the people (these rogue types of police forces, and, frankly, most cops) who are really taking away people's liberties, and yet the party that enables them is voted into office time and again by idiots who think they need to be "safer".
posted to MetaFilter by OHenryPacey at 9:32 AM on January 20, 2022

I don't really understand the point of G/O Media buying all those properties and then gutting them.

The best answer, ironically, was written by a former writer for G/O Media: The Adults In The Room

The question I hear the most about the owners of this company is “Why did they buy a bunch of publications they seem to hate?” I and my colleagues have asked Spanfeller only slightly more diplomatic variants of that question... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 6:13 PM on January 19, 2022

"Whether you’re in this industry or just a fan of its work, it’s become increasingly crushing to see the same cycle of patterns play out. A site with a unique identity and loyal readership is bought out by some Silicon Valley conglomerate that starts raving in buzz-speak about how they love the ‘content.’ They don’t want to change anything, no siree, they’re fans too, and they just want the site to be its best self, Oprah-style. Then writers start leaving. The distinct atmosphere of the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by clavdivs at 6:23 PM on January 19, 2022

The Adults in the Room (and How Things Work, written on the occasion of Gawker being shut down) are solid examples of What We've Lost. I don't feel bad about capitalizing that at all. For that weird, brief shining moment (basically, from the Tommy Craggs, post Daulerio era) Gawker and its subsites were regularly serving up some of the best writing available. For the most part, that's gone. There is very little that is publicly available that has writing on so many different topics that is so... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 6:40 PM on January 19, 2022

Social Murder: when those with power place hundreds of people in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death.
posted to MetaFilter by LegallyBread at 5:43 PM on January 13, 2022

we are slowly losing our war with reality

all of us - yes, them, too - especially them

the battle of covid has pretty much been won by the virus, no matter what we do in this country because in the world at large, we failed to get billions of us vaccinated in time - and now we have to live with that

we are not going to see real american leadership solve this - for one thing we don't HAVE it... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by pyramid termite at 5:07 PM on January 13, 2022

My father is an anti-vaxxer (and general conspiracy theorist). Our relationship has been increasingly strained for years. The COVID denialism was the last straw - we've scarcely spoken since March 2020.

Predictably, he got COVID a few months ago. It was pretty bad - he's 81. He insisted that he just had "the flu". His evidence? The ivermectin he was taking wasn't helping, which therefore proved that whatever he had wasn't COVID!

I... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by escape from the potato planet at 3:46 AM on January 13, 2022

Maplenog?
posted to MetaFilter by Literaryhero at 5:34 PM on January 12, 2022

"We could learn a lot from geese, if they knew anything."
I am going to be casually repeating this to complete strangers until they put me in the ground.

I'm going to be casually repeating this to birders I know in semi-appropriate situations until they don't invite me to go birding with them anymore.
posted to MetaFilter by mollweide at 5:28 PM on January 12, 2022

I noticed that this is from an American scholar, and I think I know what's going on here. This guy, like me before I moved to Europe, had no idea how incredibly freaking long European winter nights are. The sun goes down at 4:30pm. You've got 16 hours of darkness a day to contend with, and if you don't have electric light you're just not going to be very productive during any of those hours. Even with electric light, you get tired way early, but the average person's body isn't going to stay... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by antinomia at 12:16 AM on January 12, 2022

I recommend waiting for web 3.1, after the early adopters have submitted bug reports.

I think Web NT will be where it's at. Web 3.11 will finally be usable and have a good GUI, but Web NT will have better security.
posted to MetaFilter by a non mouse, a cow herd at 10:43 AM on January 12, 2022

A response by @ncweaver to Marlinspike and his participation in instituting MobileCoin as an executive at Signal, which he has now stepped down from, unrolled here, and its text:

OK, the more I look at "MobileCoin", the privacy focused shitcoin that Moxie Marlinspike was CTO of and then got Signal to integrate the worse it looks. Even by shitcoin standards this is very high on the fraud factor, ignoring the pre-mine.

The... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by snuffleupagus at 9:36 AM on January 12, 2022

Don't waste effort trying to understand the math/tech behind cryptocurrency and NFTs. As this article demonstrates, it's smoke and mirrors. Just like the dotcom craze, it's another perpetual motion machine that people are currently throwing stupid amounts of money at but is transparently worthless if you care about anything except getting rich. And as always, the getting rich is 100% about stealing value from the pockets of other people, not actually creating something OF value. In this case,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by lefty lucky cat at 9:36 AM on January 12, 2022

Is there an "Democratic local/downballot election fund" that one can donate to that targets winnable local elections around the country? Some quick searching didn't turn one up, but if one exists I'd be happy to donate to it.

Pinboard's "Great Slate" was an experiment in this, I don't think it ended up turning out doing much beyond separating a lot of tech workers with aspirations of reformist change from their money (and getting... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by CrystalDave at 9:32 AM on January 10, 2022

This seems way too good to be true. All of the socioeconomic and health risk factors for heart disease mortality that we've studied in detail over many years are worse than some nebulous word negativity data from Twitter? That seems pretty questionable.

Here is a critique that finds the opposite association with suicide deaths (more negative words, less suicide), which seems odd. There are a number of other issues identified in this analysis.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ssg at 10:47 AM on January 9, 2022

Yay! But I was puzzled for a moment until I realized I was confusing Allen with André Toussaint.

Dr. John Boulevard
I was in the right lane/
But I musta made a wrong turn
posted to MetaFilter by bartleby at 8:29 PM on January 8, 2022

I miss him so much. Bowie is so, so important.

His death, in retrospect, now feels like the first sign of the Apocalypse.
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Wu at 8:23 AM on January 8, 2022

I am finding it a fun exercise to think of dumb and possibly impractical ways to prevent surreptitious QR codes from replacing legit ones.

Like maybe all the outdoor QR codes could be giant and placed high enough so someone needs a ladder to alter them. Or maybe all QR codes are embedded in clear, inch-thick lucite so it's immediately obvious that someone has stickered over them. Or maybe the QR code itself isn't a flat surface but composed of several different... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by RonButNotStupid at 8:22 AM on January 7, 2022

90 Day Fiancé Star Has Medical Emergency After Farting In Jars Too Much For Side Business

I mean, I know all these words, but somehow they stop making sense when you string them together.
posted to MetaFilter by hurdy gurdy girl at 1:31 AM on January 7, 2022